associated in random thought

happy birthday, mom...

for posterity--and lack of creativity--i am digging into the archives to tell the story of my mom, the groundhog. i am blessed to have had the opportunity to throw my arms around her this year, kiss her cheek, and tell her face to face: happy birthday. i love you...

my mother saw her shadow.
february 2. my mother's birthday.

and i'm the baby daughter, age 24, 600 miles away from gift opening, candle-blowing, happy birthdays. distance is staggering on landmark days. but. it's alright. we talked on the phone. i am fully briefed on gifts received. how she spent the day.

and in these financially lean days, i don't have much to offer. in my head, i'm sending the best flowers, finding the most thoughtful gifts, flying up to her and sharing her cake.

but all i've got are phonecalls and words.

so. hello mom. i'm thinking of you.

today was unseasonable. seventy degrees and partly cloudy. breezy like spring. as i walked from the church to my car at noon, the air smelled incredibly urban, like concrete and dirt and dead leaves. it smelled like akron, ohio in october, when mom and i used to take the greyhound to visit grandma for my birthday. we would have layovers in cleveland, where i would play makeshift hopskotch on the dingy yellow and white checkered floors. i remember walking uphill under tall buildings to eat at a small diner-ish restaurant. i was so small then. my memories are snapshots: eskimo pies out of vending machines. personal tvs on the arms of black plastic chairs for soap-opera watching. the excitement of travel and anonymity and a long, wide-open road that would take me to my grandmother. take me to my birthday. take me away from everything but my mother; i had her to myself. we shared a bed.

we walked to the bus stop one day when i was 10. i was in a stone-kicking phase, always wondering how long i could kick a certain stone, before i lost it to a lawn or road or boredom. how far i could kick it from its natural element. mom obliged my game, and we kicked an akron stone along for a good twenty minutes like a team. we were focused, determined.

mom kept the stone, she told me recently. she put it (in all its nondescript greyness) in her purse that day and has put it in every new purse since.

stones like altars.
an altar called remember. ebenezer.
i remember.

i remember the uncomplicated love i felt for a mother who would play with me, who would make sacred the celebration of my birth by pulling me out of my dailyness and bringing me into her world of mother and daughter, as we stayed in her childhood home with her mother.

i remember safety. security and goodnight prayers. mom's steady breathing as she slept next to me in the small bed. i stole the blankets.
Posted by bananie at February 1, 2006 10:55 PM | TrackBack